Favorite bits of [REDACTED] Doom History?

[Doomkid]

Do any of you out there, particularly long-time Doomers, have any favorite bits of redacted/revised Doom history? Or can you perhaps recall a common claim/sentiment that has changed in recent years?

 

With the wave of Classic Doom YouTube channels and such have come many voices making many claims about Classic Doom (which I adore) but the side effect is that some things, usually completely unintentionally, get mistranslated or misquoted or whatever, and some misinformation or revised history makes the rounds and replaces the spoken word scripture us long-timers once thought of as gospel. Or heck, in some cases the id crew themselves misremember things or share brand-new snippets with us that have a domino effect on recorded Doom history.

 

Personally, my favorite bits are both of a funny/not-all-that-controversial nature: Romero (pretty clearly jokingly) claiming that the Map15 Pain Elemental secret, which was for the longest time considered untriggerable, was by design all along. Thankfully this is pretty tongue-in-cheek but some rags at the time seemed to conveniently miss the obvious sarcasm in Romero's post.

 

Another is the 20+ year claim that Bobby Prince was a lawyer, so he knew how much music he could sample without getting into trouble. About 3 years ago Bobby himself set the record straight on this, stating that he told them not to use MIDIs too similar for risk of being sued. I have no trouble believing this - for a while I thought it was weird that he would recreate like ~20 existing songs with the express intention that they go unused, but the explanation was that he was just trying to get a "feel" for the kind of music they wanted for Doom. I still feel like the sheer amount of covers he made was far more than enough to get a clear picture of how to make rock & metal in MIDI format, but regardless I buy the official revised story - in particular I find it very easy to believe he warned them about potential lawsuits.

 

If you can recall more, what are you favorite bits of revised and/or redacted Classic Doom history? It can be anything even loosely related to this concept, a shift of common opinion, or anything of that nature.

[Michael Jensen]

Only one I know is this one. As far as I know, most people believe that the missing key in TNT Map 31: Pharaoh, was an egregious oversight, caused by a lack of playtesting. However, some time ago I ran across and old doomworld thread in which Ty Halderman explained that they discovered it and gave id a fixed version at least a month before they packaged Final Doom up. For whatever reason, id simply didn't include it. 

   

[Bauul]

The one that gets me is the idea that Graf Zahl is solely responsible for GZDoom not being compatible with vanilla demos.  In fact the whole history of GZDoom seems to be misunderstood.  There seems to be this idea that somehow Graf deliberately made GZDoom non-compatible for nefarious reasons.

 

The reality, of course, is that the decision to evolve from maintaining perfect compatibility was made by Randi Heit as part of the initial concept for ZDoom seven years before GZDoom was even a thing.  I recall that one of the main points of ZDoom was to create a very robust base for making mods, and in order to facilitate that a lot of underlying changes to the codebase had to be made.  It didn't seek to maintain perfect compatibility because there were dozens of other sourceports that did.

 

And ironically, it's the mods for (G)ZDoom that ultimately contributed to it being so well known, and thus attracting newer players who don't know the history.  

 

Graf and the current dev team have actually made GZDoom more compatible with the vanilla .exe since then with the addition of various comp settings and feature changes.  

Edited January 20, 2021 by Bauul

[Quasar]

Both Romero and Carmack have, at times in the last 25+ years, claimed that they made significant contributions toward helping the Doom community understand the game's data formats and get editors established, and this is simply revisionist history. Carmack only released the Doom bsp code well after Raphael wrote the first working community node builder, and Romero only ever released any specs for Doom II, not the first Doom game, while they would have been useful.

Edited January 20, 2021 by Quasar : Apparently Doom specs about linedef types did come out, but after they were already discovered a long time ago

[P41R47]

I think the most (in)famous of this kind of misscalculated revisions that become a joke and a serious thing was wow.wad

 

One, somewhat, redacted/revision may be the TNT:Evilution/Icarus: Alien Vanguard creation.

An apologetic revision of how the events unfolded, kind of.

Either way, we got two great mapsets at the price of one, so Romero may be Santa Claus for me and TNT lovers :P.

Without his call at the last moment, Ty Halderman and TeamTNT would't decide on making Icarus at all... maybe.

 

 

Edited January 20, 2021 by P41R47

[Dynamo]

Probably the most infamous one I can think of is the repeated claims that the Japanese version of Doom on the Sega Saturn was more performant than the others. This rumor has finally died down now that so many people have disproven it, but for years many were convinced it was true.

[dew]

2 hours ago, Bauul said:

The one that gets me is the idea that Graf Zahl is responsible for GZDoom not being compatible with vanilla demos.  In fact the whole history of GZDoom seems to be misunderstood.  There seems to be this idea that somehow Graf deliberately made GZDoom non-compatible for some nefarious reasons.

On one hand I agree that blaming Graf for this is bizarro reductionist alt-reality of the zoomer meme crowds, on the other hand, it's not that simple.

 

prboom started as a fork of smmu (afaik), so it began in the same place as zdoom: utter disregard for vanilla compliance, because the mission was to introduce features. But prboom's goal became to circle back and reintroduce backward compatability, while zdoom pushed forward with not giving a fuck about it. Budko's prboom-plus fork effectively completed this effort and pr+ is at least 99.9% as faithful as choco in emulating vanilla. During that time, zdoom very publicly and ostentatiously shunned this effort and claimed its own goals. This mindset seems to have changed in recent time and zdoom introduced a pretty thorough attempt to emulate doom behaviour believably. It's definitely a much different beast than a few years ago when zdoom on strict was actually super-heretic with 2010's features. Good for GZ!

 

That said, Graf's sheer contempt to the entire concept of recording backward compatible demos is historically proven and he actually disrupted the pr+ timeline with his haphazard umapinfo implementation that disregarded any demo checks and backwards or forwards planning, just dumping it to whoever might eventually pick it up. He's been actively shitting on us for well over a decade, so I'm not fine with giving him a total free pass.

[DooM Bear]

I’ve got nothing off the top of my head but just wanted to say damn this is an awesome thread! 

 

Learning heaps already and loving it! Thanks @Doomkid :-D

[Scuba Steve]

The Netflix series 'High Score' continues the narrative that the id team planned to make Doom as open and moddable as possible... when the evidence seems to suggest they only really intended for the community to create new levels. The need for obtuse tools like deusef to add new patches to wads doesn't really lend credence to the idea that it was meant to be heavily moddable, and I seem to recall a statement that the team was completely paralyzed by the introduction of DeHackEd which went far beyond anything planned for community creation.

[CorianderCastor]

If I know my Doom history, which I don't, there were two major mission statements in doom engines, which can be summed as Boom and DOSDoom. Where Boom is DOSDoom driving the speed limit. I see the contemporary Boom as EE, while GZDoom is the realization of DOSDoom. (Poor EDGE.) There are of course many other statements. PrBoom+ is the demo port and Chocolate is the preservationist port, for example. That is each port does have a raison d'être, many of which are unique. But there's a reason I mostly dabble with I can't believe it's not vanilla, demoport, and that mod thing. But my main driver is slightly slightly slightly faster Boom.

 

More on topic: I once saw someone believe that Gibbet in Hexen was fixed in v1.1 via wikia. The Doom Wiki states it was corrected in the 64 port.

[boris]

11 hours ago, dew said:

prboom started as a fork of smmu (afaik)

 

According to the Doomwiki PrBoom is based on Boom, and SMMU on MBF (which in turn is based on Boom). Also the first release of SMMU was about 4 months after the first release of PrBoom. I guess that's how revisionism is started? ;)

[Revenant100]

It's not Doom, but it's not far removed: There's an increasingly growing subset of increasingly wrong people who think Quake's Shambler has fur, the notion which of course is patently wrong. So wrong have these people become that even modern day id Software has forgotten their own truth, choosing to erroneously depict their modern day interpretations of the Shambler with fur.

 

This is akin to depicting Doomguy with black gloves and brown eyes, which of course would be a brutally absurd falsehood to commit. Could you imagine if modern day id Software was so confused about their own games that they couldn't spend the whole 10 seconds it would take to launch Doom and check on Doomguy's actual glove and eye colors?

[Diabolución]

https://www.shacknews.com/article/110199/icon-of-sin-doom-and-the-making-of-john-romeros-sigil?page=4

 

The bolds are mine.

 

Romero wanted his megawad to feel like more than just a pack of maps. He knew the game’s code, so he could do things like make his episode appear in the main menu underneath Knee-Deep in the Dead, The Shores of Hell, Inferno, and Thy Flesh Consumed, cementing it to players as the game’s fifth and final chapter. He also knew the new episode’s difficulty should assume continuity: Players had had decades to master Doom’s toughest levels, most found in Episode 4. That was the bar, and Romero set out to raise it.

 

 

 

 

[CorianderCastor]

4 hours ago, boris said:

 

According to the Doomwiki PrBoom is based on Boom, and SMMU on MBF (which in turn is based on Boom). Also the first release of SMMU was about 4 months after the first release of PrBoom. I guess that's how revisionism is started? ;)

Yeah, isn't EE the one based on SMMU. There's two reasons I prefer the moniker EE: it's what the authors of the port call it, and it equates it to MBF and SMMU. The latter furthers my narrative that EE is the one true successor of Boom.

 

While not idtech1, there is a lot of misconception of the panic button puzzle in Hexen II. I need to check vanilla Hexen II, but in uHexen2 simply waiting at the final button until the text pops up on screen allows finishing the puzzle. Also save scumming works in uHexen2 💯. I tried this after reading it in the comments on the Steam community guide for the game by a user named Panc.

[Diabolución]

PrBoom 2.3.0 borrowed code of SMMU, though.

 

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/post/982775/

 

https://github.com/coelckers/prboom-plus/blob/e96bc5226217fe92e67439cfef1e83885ded3fbe/prboom2/TODO#L592

[Koff3Katt]

Non-Doom related; however, I did find it interesting that in vanilla/chocolate v1.3 of Heretic (SOTSR) during deathmatch, a tomed firemace ball CANNOT kill a player using the ring of invulnerability, even though this has been stated to be the case in Heretic in general. Maybe it was possible in earlier versions, the same way the Life Leech in Blood doesn't have its namesake ability in its latest patch due to Monolith fearing balance issues.

[CorianderCastor]

32 minutes ago, Diabolución said:

PrBoom 2.3.0 borrowed code of SMMU, though.

 

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/post/982775/

 

https://github.com/coelckers/prboom-plus/blob/e96bc5226217fe92e67439cfef1e83885ded3fbe/prboom2/TODO#L592

 

Haven't PrBoom and EE crossbred?

[dmslr]

4 hours ago, Revenant100 said:

There's an increasingly growing subset of increasingly wrong people who think Quake's Shambler has fur, the notion which of course is patently wrong.

You can't blame us though. There was no way to find out it by observing. People could only guess. Shambler resembles a mammal; the vast majority of mammals has fur. This explains the misconception. Even if Adrian Carmack has made it clear, he could be not 100% honest. I remember John Romero also answered to a similar question, which color cacodemon's blood is. His answer was red. Apparently, we all agree that cacos bleed blue blood. The same story could be here. Mr. Carmack probably didn't want to be bothered by the answer and just said no. You know, shambler's model literally doesn't have fur, it is covered with just a plain texture.

[chungy]

17 hours ago, dew said:

prboom started as a fork of smmu (afaik)

https://github.com/Doom-Utils/historic-ports/commits/prboom

[xvertigox]

I've got nothing to contribute to the thread but I want to point out how interesting @Quasar's link is. I highly recommend checking it out.

 

19 hours ago, Quasar said:

Both Romero and Carmack have, at times in the last 25+ years, claimed that they made significant contributions toward helping the Doom community understand the game's data formats and get editors established, and this is simply revisionist history.

[Diabolución]

1 hour ago, PaquoCastor said:

 

Haven't PrBoom and EE crossbred?

 

I do not understand. Are you talking about this comment? About the UMAPINFO thing?

 

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/post/2001216/

 

That comment is wishful thinking, as far as I am concerned.

 

Leaving that aside, it seems that Final Doom for PlayStation uses actually normal .wad files with LZSS compression, not a supposed special format with an exotic compression algorithm. Paging @Quasar for details.

[SaladBadger]

I think at least a little of that came from the original Doom press release mentioning that Doom was going to be an "open game," and hey id had seen the wolf3d stuff and was tolerant enough of it so that made sense that they'd do it. Sadly, that open game bullet point was about as representative of the final game as the point about the seamless gameplay, or the information terminals, or wall damage, or environment morphing, or okay this joke is getting old.

 

Carmack and Romero claiming this is pretty good evidence that even those with otherwise fairly reliable memories can't remember everything so clearly, since human brains and memories are weird, man. The game being able to load external wads is about as much of a development aid as it is a means to load user-generated content.

[ketmar]

6 hours ago, Diabolución said:

https://www.shacknews.com/article/110199/icon-of-sin-doom-and-the-making-of-john-romeros-sigil?page=4

 

The bolds are mine.

 

Romero wanted his megawad to feel like more than just a pack of maps. He knew the game’s code, so he could do things like make his episode appear in the main menu

(narrating with Perlman voice) journalism. journalim never changes.

[Doomkid]

18 hours ago, Scuba Steve said:

The Netflix series 'High Score' continues the narrative that the id team planned to make Doom as open and moddable as possible... when the evidence seems to suggest they only really intended for the community to create new levels. The need for obtuse tools like deusef to add new patches to wads doesn't really lend credence to the idea that it was meant to be heavily moddable, and I seem to recall a statement that the team was completely paralyzed by the introduction of DeHackEd which went far beyond anything planned for community creation.

I don’t doubt this in the slightest, but I swear I’ve read somewhere that Doom was meant to easily accept custom sprites, but that there’s a little mistake somewhere that prevents it from working, which thus in turn meant DEUSF had to be made.. I could be misremembering that though. With that said I’m not at all surprised DeHackEd was a bit jarring for id at first.. it’s easy to imagine some of the incredible stuff modders did caused a mix of amazement and worry.

 

However it does seem that even if they were initially shocked, they softened on it after a few years - I also remember reading that Carmack forking over the source code was largely due to @Linguica convincing him to, but that he was already very impressed with mods like Star Wars Doom which also made him more open to the idea. Is that more revisionist history? I’m sure I can source all of these claims if I dig hard enough...

 

EDIT: So as to not improperly revise history myself, Ling didn't convince him to release the source code (which happened in 1997), but rather  he asked him to re-release it under the GNU GPL. Which was still important of course.

Edited January 21, 2021 by Doomkid

[Diabolución]

Breaking my self-imposed rule of three answers per topic at the most (I am well aware that most members tolerate my posts, not enjoy)...

 

https://pastebin.com/Z5EGqTSa

 

Line 963.

 

[P41R47]

5 minutes ago, Diabolución said:

Breaking my self-imposed rule of three answers per topic at the most (I am well aware that most members tolerate my posts, not enjoy)...

 

https://pastebin.com/Z5EGqTSa

 

Line 963.

 

Post whatever you like, pal!

I never seen any comment by you that may be offensive or not well writen.

Also, generally speaking, your comments are interesting.

So go wild with this ;)

[LordEntr0py]

 

44 minutes ago, Diabolución said:

Breaking my self-imposed rule of three answers per topic at the most (I am well aware that most members tolerate my posts, not enjoy)...

 

https://pastebin.com/Z5EGqTSa

 

Line 963.

 

The bugfix section in this is fascinating.

 

Quote

- gun projectiles (rockets, plasma, rockets) will no longer trigger

linedefs

 

[ketmar]

1 hour ago, Doomkid said:

I don’t doubt this in the slightest, but I swear I’ve read somewhere that Doom was meant to easily accept custom sprites, but that there’s a little mistake somewhere that prevents it from working, which thus in turn meant DEUSF had to be made..

it looks like a simple oversight. the mechanics of using later lumps is there, but JC forgot about "pseudodirectories". i.e. sprites, flats, etc. are only searched between the corresponding "wad markers", thus creating a kind of "wad subdirs". lumps from pwads are not inside those markers, so it doesn't work as expected. i am sure that this is simply because id themselves never need to do such things, so JC just forgot to properly test it, and the original idea was "let users replace/add any lump".

[Maximum Matt]

On 1/20/2021 at 9:05 AM, Doomkid said:

Another is the 20+ year claim that Bobby Prince was a lawyer, so he knew how much music he could sample without getting into trouble. About 3 years ago Bobby himself set the record straight on this, stating that he told them not to use MIDIs too similar for risk of being sued. I have no trouble believing this - for a while I thought it was weird that he would recreate like ~20 existing songs with the express intention that they go unused, but the explanation was that he was just trying to get a "feel" for the kind of music they wanted for Doom. I still feel like the sheer amount of covers he made was far more than enough to get a clear picture of how to make rock & metal in MIDI format, but regardless I buy the official revised story - in particular I find it very easy to believe he warned them about potential lawsuits.

This is awesome, sir.  He did those 'covers' simply as examples and didn't have anything to do with their placement in the games, and was against it.  I needed this information and thank you, good 'Kid.  

[Xaser]

Speaking of journalism flubs, let's not forget the repeated assertions by various media outlets that all notable Doom mods are made by a single, hyper-prolific individual named "Someone." :P